MANY once "respectable" professions, including my own, have achieved a pretty grimy image in the eyes of the general public these days. People as a rule are distinctly underwhelmed by the reputation of politicians, lawyers, journalists and estate agents. Even doctors get sued with monotonous regularity.

But, thanks to the scenery and the people of the Yorkshire Dales and a Scotsman who was a dab hand with the pen, there is still one calling which stands high on a pedestal in public esteem. And, in my own personal experience, its practitioners deserve that respect.

We are talking vets here, of the image created in general by the Yorkshire novels of James Herriot, and in particular of a group of Skipton professionals who once did my family a great service.

Ian Smith, now officially retired but working just as hard as ever, was one of the people who built a small veterinary practice specialising mainly in farm animals into an ultra-modern, hi-tech animal hospital at Kingsway, Skipton.

Once they operated on small animals - in other words pets - just on Thursday mornings. Now, they operate every day of the week, sometimes with two theatres going simultaneously. They also have helped thousands of grieving pet owners. Including my family and I.

Our English pointer, coincidentally called Smithy, had a serious throat illness and was on the verge of death. Although the Kingsway vets had never done the operation before, they practised on a cadaver and then put Smithy under the knife.

He not only survived but was given a new lease of life, a further happy, healthy 18 months which he lived to the full.

So forgive me, please, for not being quite as objective as I might but those 18 months were also a joy to my family. To me, they stand as a glowing example of the work that Ian Smith and his colleagues were prepared to tackle when veterinary medicine was advancing almost as fast as its human counterpart.

"Those were the halcyon days," says Ian at his stone farmhouse home between Skipton and Rylstone. "The James Herriot novels had given vets an almost God-like image but under all that glamour, much very serious work was under way.

"Veterinary science was making incredible steps forward, advancing almost as quickly as human medicine. When I first arrived in Skipton, we didn't even have an X-ray machine.

"But by the 1980s, new drugs and anaesthetics were coming on to the market, animals were being better treated and fed by their owners, and were living longer. It was a great time to be in my job."

Ian was born near Garstang in 1944 into a family heavily involved in the farming industry. His father ran a joinery business which did much work on farms, one uncle bred pedigree cattle, another, Jim Walker, was a well-known vet in Otley.

"I spent my childhood working on farms and developed a deep feeling for animals," he recalls. "I think that is the main motivation for most young people wanting to become vets. This was well before Alf Wight - the Thirsk vet who used the Herriot pen-name - had published his first book."

After Lancaster Royal Grammar School and veterinary college in Edinburgh, he returned to Lancashire, working with a local practice and marrying wife Ethel.

In 1970 he came to Skipton to join the practice run by VJS Leslie ("he always used his initials because he hated Victor, his first name") when it was based in Newmarket Street.

"There were four of us but the practice was 90 per cent concentrated on cattle and sheep," he went on. "I always considered myself as a 'generalist' - a man who could work with farm animals as well as domestic pets - and that was the time when small animal medicine was becoming an ever growing part of the business.

"Skipton was growing, more people were moving into Craven, and more of them were keeping pets.

"After a few years, it was obvious that the Newmarket Street premises were too small so we had the Kingsway centre custom-built. That building, I suppose, is the monument to a life's work by my colleagues and I."

This, also, was the time when Alf Wight had become one of the world's best selling authors. Vets were glamour boys and girls and, at one time, there were many more applicants for places at veterinary colleges than to medical schools. So how did this affect Ian, his wife and their two growing daughters?

"Obviously it was very flattering but it could be embarrassing at times," he laughed. "It is difficult to be treated as a god when you are just an ordinary professional chap going about your daily business.

"But I think the Herriot books did a great service for my profession because it showed the difficult side as well as the glamour.

"Although I only met Alf Wight a couple of times, I admired him greatly. He was rich, famous and could have lived anywhere - but he wrote those books at the end of a hard day's work as a practising Dales vet."

Hard work and veterinary surgery seem to go hand in hand. After he "retired" in 2001, Ian Smith was soon back at work during the foot and mouth crisis and later as an inspector for Defra. He still farms a herd of pedigree Suffolk sheep and is on the committee of the Gargrave Show.

In the meantime, he and his colleagues keep a lot of animals healthy - and a lot of owners happy. I can vouch for that from personal experience.